Smart nesting box is small wooden box for nesting birds. It is equipped with the live camera feed and some sensors. Four smart nesting boxes were made and three of them were placed in the wild. One was inhabited with the great tit in te early march 2017. After that, the bird laid 11 eggs. The bird then incubated eggs for 12 days. On the Easter Monday, the first shells cracked and newborns started poping out of the eggs.

I prepared the whole project for local school. The nesting boxes were made by 8 children aged from 11 to 14 during afternoon classes. It was great fun and the young scientists learned many new skills from electronics, materials, hand tools, crafting, programming, components, circuit design, biology, photography, physics, etc… The nesting box is described in detail here with all necessary production steps. Contact for further info is m@v4.si. The three nesting boxes placed in the wild have…

This can be useful for many simple applications, like detecting and timestamping passes at certain location.

The R.pi should be up and running. Connect the pushbutton to free GPIO. In our example we connected the button to pin 11. The pin is configured with the pullup, which means the button must pull the GPIO pin to ground. Pin 12 on r.Pi model 2B (40 pin P1) is GND:

Ultra simple schematic for this example

Now prepare some simple script on your fancy web browser, which will be called when someone presses the button. Here is example, which simply adds one line with time and date at the end of the file “log.txt” every time when file is loaded:

The R.Pi is excellent module for many applications. Unfortunately it is not easy to stack USB modules connected to it. When USB module, e.g. RTL-SDR is attached to the R.Pi, the whole package become very long requiring larger box. One solution is to use USB extension cable, but it again require additional space. Here is another, more compact solution:

I took old cover from plastic sewer pipe (it was never used ha ha). Then I drilled four holes for M3 screws and one bigger hole for camera module lens. The housing was prepared from one litre PET bottle. I cut the bottle to proper size and inserted raspberry Pi with the camera inside the bottle. Next the LAN cable with passive 5V “PoE” was inserted.

Finally, I heated the bottle with hot air gun at the camera side to shrink a little bit and tightly close the gap between the plastic camera “holder” and the bottle .

I recently set up a APRS gateway. Check instructions in older posts. In the script pymultimonaprs you can set weather when set in a json-file. eg: “weather”: “/path/to/weather.json”. I live next to the automated weather station for our city. Instead of building own WX I decided to use the data from this nearby station. The data is provided in XML from our national agency ARSO. The data is available for some major cities in Europe, too.

Main idea was to prepare PHP script to parse the XML data and prepare text file, which is acceptable for pymultimonaprs. Next step is to wget this text from some server and copy it to the raspberry pi with cron job.

This is part two (here is part one) of the tutorial how to use Raspberry-Pi in APRS gateway.

In part one I explain how to install OS for Raspberry Pi and get RTL dongle up and running, which enables radio reception and listening received signal with FM demodulator on audio jack (simple FM receiver). For next steps you will need HAM licence with own call sign. Mine is S54MTB.